Link Failure Detection in Multi-hop Control Networks
For control engineers and network designers, this work addresses the problem of detecting link failures in wireless control networks, but the results are theoretical and lack empirical validation.
The paper characterizes link failure detection in multi-hop control networks, providing necessary and sufficient conditions on plant dynamics and communication protocol, and a methodology to design network topology, scheduling, and routing to satisfy these conditions.
A Multi-hop Control Network (MCN) consists of a plant where the communication between sensors, actuators and computational unit is supported by a wireless multi-hop communication network, and data flow is performed using scheduling and routing of sensing and actuation data. We characterize the problem of detecting the failure of links of the radio connectivity graph and provide necessary and sufficient conditions on the plant dynamics and on the communication protocol. We also provide a methodology to \emph{explicitly} design the network topology, scheduling and routing of a communication protocol in order to satisfy the above conditions.